


And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.

by romans



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Gen, dw-secret-santa fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-20
Updated: 2013-11-20
Packaged: 2018-01-02 03:25:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1051954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romans/pseuds/romans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If he pulls just one thread-</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.

"Don’t worry," the Doctor says, "Jack will be just fine." Jack can’t die, or won’t be able to, or hasn’t yet, or has in the past- he can’t unmuddle it, not now. He has more important things on his mind, so he throws Jack Harkness to the wolves of time and chance and _runs._

Rose, half-stumbling alongside him, is white-faced from shock and blood loss.

"Come on," he says, and he swings her up into his arms, stretching his long legs to cover the last few feet to the TARDIS at a dead run. It’s a true anachronism, here, because technically it has never existed. The Austrians hadn’t gone in for telephone boxes; it’s only the dream of a mad alien. He can’t recall where it came from, truth be told. Something about Rose jogs a half-memory, an uneasy feeling at the back of his mind, but it slips away every time he tries to grasp at it. Rose is heavy in his arms now, and he all but knocks the doors down getting into the TARDIS.

"Rose," he says, as he barrels into the medbay, hearts racing. He sets her down, gently, on a bed. " _Rose,”_  he barks, voice rough with fear. She frowns, and then blinks up at him, distantly.

"Come on, love," the Doctor says. The TARDIS hums around them, the bellows of a giant pair of lungs. Rose’s chest is rising slowly, under the blood. In, out. In, out. He touches her face, gently, tries to think. His head hurts, lately.

"We’ve been through worse," he says. "Remember? The werewolf in Scotland, and old Vicky?"

She furrows her brow at him.

Good, then. They haven’t met Queen Victoria yet, or been to Scotland. Of course, Scotland doesn’t exist anymore, not after the Great War. So many boys, cut down in their prime. He wonders what happened to Jamie’s family. Old Vicky had been a right old dictator, he’d give her that. And then the Germans had come-

Old history. Or new. He could make it new, for Rose.

"Rose," he says. Her eyes are closed again. He touches her skin. It’s cold under his fingers.

This isn’t how it ends. This cannot be how it ends. He closes his eyes, fingers resting on Rose’s cheek, and opens his mind to the TARDIS.

He sees Rose, running for her life after closing up the Coffee House. He sees the great domed roof of the Semaan-Boutros Mosque rising above the Thames, the lines and lines of names inscribed on plaques outside of its gates. This little human from a backwater corner of the Great Austro-Ottoman Empire had taken him by the hand without a single question, and run-

And run, but not quickly enough. The crack swallowed her whole, no father to save her this time, while he stood in his bowtie and his bloody fez and let her go. Had it been a fez? He reaches back further, hears Jack laughing, tastes bananas, smells cordite and concrete and war. What he wouldn’t give for some nanobots, he thinks.

He lets go of Rose to rub his temples. They feel like they’ve been pounding for _years_ , maybe forever. He reaches out for her hand, and follows the thread back, and back.

His memories of John Smith, schoolteacher, are fuzzy at best. He remembers the inevitability of war, how he had thought it would be short. All of his memories of that time are limited in scope, by the small mind of a mortal man. There had been a doctor, a brilliant, beautiful, _angry_  doctor, he remembers that, who had tried so hard to warn him.

She was gone now, he knows that. Never existed, snuffed out like so many in the Time Wars. Something had happened to time, tangled the skein completely, made him dizzy and confused. His head throbs.

 _The ground beneath our feet is spinnin’ at 1,000 miles an hour and the entire planet is hurtling around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, and I can feel it. We’re fallin’ through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go…_  

Had it been Mars? No, a single bullet had put paid to that madness.

"Rose," he says, opening his eyes, needing to see that she’s still there. He’s losing everyone all over again, so many lost, so many snatched up by the Great War, the war that never should have happened, and when he opens his eyes Rose is gone, too.

“ _No,_ " he says, like a child, but she doesn’t move under his hands. The TARDIS hums around him, and he sees what she will be: a pile of ashes, dust slipping through his fingers. He sees Jack’s anguished face- past, future, it hardly matters, and the impassive face of the AnneDriod.

There had been Daleks.

Had there been Daleks? The Doctor can’t recall anymore.

"Doctor," Rose says. Her body is lying on the bed in front of him, peaceful and lifeless, but her voice is behind him, which should be impossible.

"My Doctor," Rose says, fondly, and the TARDIS hums along with her. When he turns around to look at her, she’s standing in the doorway of the med bay. Her hair is short and her clothes are different, but he barely notices.

It’s not Rose, not exactly. And it’s not his TARDIS. She’s looking at her own body, at herself holding herself, and tears are streaming down her cheeks

"This should not be," she says. The TARDIS echoes the words in his head, drowning out the blessed pounding. She looks up at him.

“ _My Doctor,_ " she says again. " _I will save us all._ ”

"How?" he asks, clinging to the table behind him. Rose’s cold hand touches his and he reaches out to take it.

"I will save us," she says again, and then everything turns to gold and glass.

The Doctor is at Moritz Schiller’s cafe, with two rye-and-ham sandwiches tucked into the crook of his left elbow and a palm full of change in his right hand, when a car stalls out across the street. He drops the rye and the change, filled with a sudden premonition of horror, but before he can turn around Gavrim Princip has fired one- two- shots into the back of the car, and the crowd is screaming, and the kroner haven’t yet finished bouncing off of the pavement, golden and bright in the sunlight, and this world has already ended.

"Gavrim-" he says, but the boy has been seized and borne away by the crowd, white-faced and black-eyed and defiant, and the Doctor’s hearts break for him, and for all the innocent souls around him.

He can fix this, he thinks. He has to. He can’t take another war.

If he pulls just one thread-

  
"Doctor!" a woman says, and a hand closes firmly around his arm. He looks over to find himself staring into the eyes of a sensibly-dressed middle-aged lady.

"Doctor, don’t," she says.

"Victoria?" he asks. She shouldn’t be here- she smiles at him.

"Just popping over for a visit," she says.

"There’s going to be a war," he says. "A terrible war."

"I know," Victoria says, gently. "I lost my friends in the war," she adds, and suddenly he sees it from her human perspective. "I never got a chance to warn them or to say goodbye, and _I wouldn’t want it._ You taught me that. So you see, I lost them twice. They’re here, now, over in England, but they’re also gone.”

"But-"

"I have to go soon," she says. "But I am telling you not to do this. By saving these lives you will destroy many, many more."

"Who brought you here?" he asks. It should be impossible. Victoria grins and holds up her wrist. Beneath the demure lace of her sleeve is a cuff that bears the unmistakable imprint of the 51st century. Time agents. Of course they’d be invested in the Wars.

"I always did like time travel," she says. Her face sobers, and she takes his hand in hers. "Please," she says. And then she’s gone, whisked away by the hysterical crowd and the tide of history.

The Doctor, fighting the flow of the crowd, returns to the TARDIS in a meditative state. He sighs heavily, as the doors shut behind him, and then a thought occurs to him. He can’t stop this war, but that doesn’t mean he can’t _meddle._

He sets a course for Villengard.

**Author's Note:**

> Secret Santa fic for watchingfromtheforrest in the dw christmas ficathon on tumblr.


End file.
